Captaincy General of Santo Domingo

The Captaincy General of Santo Domingo was Spain's first colony in the Americas, set up on the Caribbean island of Hispaniola after the voyages of Christopher Columbus in the 1490s. From its capital, Santo Domingo, counted as the first European city in the Americas, it served as the early administrative and military base for Spanish expansion into the Caribbean and the mainland. Over three centuries it shrank to the eastern two-thirds of the island, the basis of today's Dominican Republic.

Before 1492 the island, called Ayiti or Quisqueya by its inhabitants, was home to the Taíno, organised into five chiefdoms under caciques. Columbus claimed it for Castile on his first voyage and named it La Isla Española. A fort he left behind, La Navidad, was destroyed after its garrison clashed with local people. On his second voyage in 1493 he founded the town of La Isabela on the north coast, and in 1496 his brother Bartholomew established a new settlement on the south coast that became Santo Domingo. After a hurricane in 1502, governor Nicolás de Ovando rebuilt it on the opposite bank of the Ozama River.

A gold rush in the Cordillera Central lasted roughly from 1500 to 1508. The Taíno were forced to work in the mines, and forced labour, hunger, violence and introduced disease caused a collapse of the native population. One estimate cited in modern histories puts their number at around 400,000 at the start, falling to about 60,000 by 1508 and to only a few dozen by 1535; such figures are uncertain and debated. The Taíno leader Enriquillo held out in the mountains for fourteen years before the Spanish agreed terms with him in 1534.

In its first decades Santo Domingo was the political centre of Spanish America. The expeditions that settled Puerto Rico and Cuba, and Hernán Cortés's venture to Mexico, were launched from the island. The colony gained a royal court of appeal, the Real Audiencia, in 1512, a diocese in 1511, the first hospital in the Americas from 1503, and in 1538 a university founded by papal bull. Enslaved Africans were brought in from 1510 to work new sugar mills, and in December 1522 enslaved Wolof workers on a plantation of Diego Colón rose in the first major revolt of enslaved people in the Americas.

As Mexico and Peru drew settlers away and Havana became the main stop for the treasure fleets, Hispaniola sank into poverty, relying on cattle and smuggling. Francis Drake seized and ransomed Santo Domingo in 1586. In 1605 the crown forcibly emptied the north and west of the island to stop illegal trade, the so-called devastaciones de Osorio, leaving land that French buccaneers and settlers occupied over the following decades. An English attack on the capital in 1655 failed, and the force took Jamaica instead. By the Treaty of Ryswick in 1697 Spain accepted French rule over the western third, which became Saint-Domingue, and the Treaty of Aranjuez fixed the border in 1777.

Bourbon trade reforms in the eighteenth century, privateering and settlers from the Canary Islands revived the colony. Around 1791 its population was perhaps 125,000, far smaller than that of the French colony next door. During the Haitian Revolution Spain ceded Santo Domingo to France by the Treaty of Basel in 1795; it returned to Spain in 1809. A declaration of independence on 1 December 1821 ended this colonial period, though Spain briefly reannexed the country from 1861 to 1865. Like the Captaincy General of Cuba, the colony was part of the wider Spanish Empire, and its division of the island explains the separate histories of the Dominican Republic and Haiti.

Our 1530, 1600, 1650 and 1700 maps draw this colony under the label "Hispaniola (Spain)". The maps show the colony at fixed moments; its real history ran from the 1490s to 1821, and the French presence in the west grew through the seventeenth century.